For Michel Serres, the parasite is ‘the elementary relation’. He is drawn in by the ontological mysteries presented by ‘relations’: what is the connection being and relating? Is there a distinction between the position and content of an entity and the relations by which it came to occupy that station? For Serres the process of writing is very much an elaboration of the argument itself. Indeed, at times this makes for rather tedious reading, and yet, the point is well taken: “the knot is explained/unfolded [s’explique]; it comes undone; it is unknotted; it was nothing, nothing but folds, loops, and coils. When explained, the banquet shows the hungry its empty table” (245). The Parasite is a seemingly endless train of thoughts inspired by a corpus of fables and myths, the texts of La Fontaine, Plato, Homer, Rousseau, and ‘the like’ if such a category exists. It begins with a city rat and a country rat eating the tax farmer’s leftovers. The rats continue to make appearances throughout the text – sometimes making noise, sometimes fleeing from noise, staying in the city, returning to the country, parasiting the farmer, being parasited by him, chewing, talking, hiding. One reads for ‘the point’. One is thwarted. From Serres himself: “I am a tired reader, out of breath; I’ve still read nothing after having read so much and run so much… Starved, glued to the door. Beggar. I wait for bread; I wait for wine; I ask to be fed… I require a bit of referent” (241). Tired indeed!
But the ‘point’, if I dare hazard one, is that there is no stable referent: there are parasites, hosts, and guests, always in threes, but never inhabiting the same position for long. There are systems of relations, but as soon as a noise disrupts them, new systems form from the pieces. That which was a parasite (a play on biological parasite, social parasite, and the additional French meaning of static or noise, but always returning to the etymological ‘eating beside’) just as quickly finds itself in the position of host, or guest. Parasites are parasited, systems form and collapse, black boxes hide the workings of these systems and yet the box, when laid bare, is empty. When they ‘work’, they form an invisible system; when they ‘fail’ they make the system intelligible. “The parasite invents something new” (36). In the three pointed star (guest/host/parasite), the parasite makes diagonal lines from parallel lines, it mixes incompatible forms, it creates new orders, producing new relations and new forms of relations. The lion becomes the prey, the king becomes the weakest; the arrow of the parasite is unidirectional – it is the elementary relation – but positions shift at the slightest noise, radically altering the status of the mover.
The relationship between entities and relations is never quite made explicit. Indeed, to render such an opinion would be to attempt to force open the black box, to attempt to ‘explain’ without expecting an empty table as the result. I am reminded of Schrodinger’s cat: to look inside the box is to demand an ontological stability that defies the reality of the cat’s existence. Perhaps the closest we come to a mediation on the status of beings, relations, and beings in relation to relations, is in the discussion of quasi-objects and –subjects. Here we are given the analogy of a basketball game. “Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance. The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws. Skill with the ball supposes a Ptolemaic revolution of which few theoreticians are capable, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves” (226). And so, by redirecting our attention to the movement of the ball and decentering the team as that which directs the system, we begin to glimpse the parasitic workings of the system. The quasi-object decenters by radically redefining centering: the person with the ball becomes the ‘I’. The rest become the ‘we’ – not in the aggregate sense constituted by the remaining possible ‘I’’s that come together to not have the ball, but in an irreducible sense. “The ‘we’ is not a sum of the ‘I’’s, but a novelty produced by legacies, concessions, withdrawals, resignations, of the ‘I’. The ‘we’ is less a set of ‘I’’s than the set of the sets of its transmissions” (228). ‘I’’s and ‘we’’s are produced out of moving systems, entities emerge from unlikely circulations, only to be transubstantiated back into relations as soon as the ball is passed.
It seems best perhaps to take Serres at his word, such as when he says “Yes, my philosophy is adjectival; it is awe-struck. The real is not rational; it is improbable and miraculous” (46); “Henceforth, my book is rigorously fuzzy” (56); “I don’t want to play any more. Neither at the game of who is smarter nor that of the truth. For you can die of hunger, of cold, of drowning, while playing” (75); “We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks; no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked. This one here speaks learnedly; he is as boring as the last course he gave; he doesn’t care if people hear him” (121); and “The host does not speak much and is not understood; his logic is paradoxal. It is fuzzy; it is our own. His parasites are eating him up, and their noise covers his voice” (216).
Taking up the metaphor and pun of the parasite in the threefold way of meaning biological parasite, social parasite, and static or noise (as it does, apparently, in French), Serres posits a unidirectional relationship where the parasite feeds on a host like noise “feeds on” information, and universalizes his metaphor into a concept of social relations—that is, human relations are not “like” parasite relations, but rather they are parasite relations. Embodying his “argument” in his text, Serres makes The Parasite a parasite, a noisesome bloodsucker that feeds on culture and produces nothing (or only waste… or W.A.S.T.E. (see below)). As Serres writes: “The chain of parasitism is a simple relation of order, irreversible like the flow of the river. One feeds on another and gives nothing in return… For parasitism is an elementary relation; it is, in fact, the elements of the relation” (182).
It seems more interesting to me to consider Serres ethnographically, or even merely historically, than it does to consider his work philosophically. Like Derrida and Foucault he seems to write in a tradition of anti-humanist post-structural French thought that, after Nietzsche, works to find the irrational in the rational, after Heidegger, works to turn from philosophy to poetry, after Kojeve, struggles with the idea of the end of history, and against Sartre turns from existential political engagement to an individualist ethics of transgression and play. Serres, like Derrida, is engaged in an argument with the western philosophical canon that has to do with the very fundamentals of what philosophy is and does and how one philosophizes. For Serres, writing in the dark aspect of the Romantic tradition as it comes through Nietzsche, Artaud, the Dadaists, and the Situationists, the creativity of the irrational, unconscious, or incoherent is valued over the “systemization” of rationality.
Piercing the foggy banks of nonsense that (deliberately) cloud the pages of The Parasite are occasional insights that seem interesting, provocative, or worth following up. On the question of order and disorder, though, on noise and social relations, I found Serres’ regular references to Maxwell’s Demon to call to mind a much more beautiful and arresting work, which addresses some of the same themes, and Maxwell’s Demon, and even W.A.S.T.E…. namely Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
It is difficult to extract from a totalizing work like The Parasite, which as Roy rightfully says, “Serres, like Derrida, is engaged in an argument with the western philosophical canon that has to do with the very fundamentals of what philosophy is and does and how one philosophizes”. How do you deal with a sentence as powerful as “Metamorphosis is omnipotence”? Well, I guess we do what we will do in class tomorrow and focus on quasi-objects or something else very specific in The Parasite and try to get a grasp on these specific concepts (if we can call them concepts at all). After all, “philosophy with its cold-heartedness, with its military strategy…it want[s] to [be] separate” (251). But, perhaps, Serres pushes us away from this. How can we be warm-hearted? How can we be more like the holistic anthropologist? How can we not only see the larger picture, but stay with it in our conversation? How do we say something which is less specific, yet always aware of the presence of the parasite (the specific), something as warm-hearted as “Good morning hare; stay if you’d like” (p.88; as Serres tells us: “as long as you have one hare in the garden, and only one hare, it’s better to make your peace with it”).
Like a classic Pollock painting, all I saw were a bunch of sporadic lines thrown together in The Parasite, as if someone vomited… suddenly. But then I got to page 200ish, perhaps a place equivalent to standing 20 or so feet away from a Pollock painting, and I saw an awesome kind of order. This order is found when you suddenly discover the rhythm of Serres’ work. This is perhaps what I mean by “seeing the larger picture”. It is when the rhythm of Serres’ text is discovered that the true meaning/presence/job/work of the parasite is discovered.
This rhythm, as an order or unity, revolves around the parasite. As we are told, the parasite, the ferret or fox, the (all)white domino, the joker or wildcard, the dollar bill, “that little troublemaker” is the exciter (196,190). It does not transform, but it does change states (193). Serres story is that of the Parasite’s journey, which is precisely the story of ourselves since we are inextricably linked, so much to the extent that it would seem we are no different from the ball “over there, on the ground, it is nothing; it is stupid; it has no meaning, no function” (225). The rhythm, cascade or “chain of the parasite [as] a simple relation of order” (183) is how it “transforms a physiological order into a new order” (198).
An interesting duality in Serres’ work (as much as the brain can ingest it) is the dynamic tension between the tripartite and hierarchy. In his explanation of the host – parasite - interrupter chain he states, “The three positions are equivalent. Each is in a line with the others, and each can play the third.” (19) Given this idea of interchangeability, he also discusses power structures throughout the text, for example, in the form of master-slaves (59) or vicar – priest (109). So, on the one hand there is equivalence and the other domination/subservience. He goes on to say, “This slave has become a master, that is certainly true, but far from becoming a master of the master, he becomes another master of the slaves. As such, as the representative of the slaves, he struggles with the master.” (59) Is this the process within the hierarchy that makes it interchangeable? What is the topography of Serres’ imagined world in this sense? Can we think of this in terms of Jullien’s idea of position as independent from the occupier? What does that do to Serres’ quasi-objects?
Similarly, in the preface, Wolfe links Serres’ book to Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. (xi) Since the two are contemporaries and have collaborated how do their ideas correspond in their objects – the black box, the arrow of time? In other words, are the objects comparable enough that can we read this through a Latourian lens?
Serres’s emphasis on relationality speaks to our conversations about the kinds of ethnographic writing and reading that decenter the human so often figured as the sole perceiving and experiencing subject. Serres is not interested in looking for depth of meaning in stable “places”, nor does he care to ask what different perspectives there are on things. His concerns are situated outside such humanist pursuits: “what is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations. The relation is that of guest to host” (8). Serres figures relations between things in the world as always parasitic and it is through this parasitism that new worlds emerge. “Parasite” draws our attention to this emergence and --through text-- performs it. It erases the division between humans and nonhumans: all are busy sorting out the noise in order to set up workable relations, if just for a while. “I no longer see the difference between the bee and the architect” (86).
While for many philosophers and social theorists things come in twos, they come in threes for Serres. “Bivalent systems get lost around here” (67). The third mediates and its work often goes unrecognized (63). It’s a specific kind of mediation: it does not follow from the existence of two things in need of reconciling. The parasite institutes the relation, the third comes before the second. For Levi-Strauss, the poet of twos, the complexity of the system was generated throught the logical work of binary oppositions. For Serres, the poet of threes, the logic is fuzzy: it is not about 0 or 1, but 0, 1 and the gray area in between. Complexity figured in twos grows through proliferating of binaries which sort and exclude, this OR that. Complexity figured in threes grows through incorporation of still more fuzziness, this AND that.
Different numbers prompt different desires. Write a book while counting to two and you get “Elementary Structures of Kinship”: the text works to undo the complexity to uncover a unitary set of norms somewhere at the bottom, the ur-binary. Write a book while counting to three and the process will be very different: the text adds to the complexity. “[T]he genius never undoes the system; he generalizes it, introducing into it a supplementary variable with its countervariable ... The recovery of the simple through the complex” (68).
“There are two ways to die, two ways to sleep, two ways to be stupid - a head first dive into chaos or stabilized installation in order and chitin. We are provided with enough senses and instinct to protect us against the danger of explosion, but we do not have enough when faced with death from order or with falling asleep from rules and harmony” (127).
Is Serres an anarchist? I mean this in the best possible way. There were a series of unexpected resonances in the Parasite to the work of some anarchist theorists: Kropotkin on mutual aid, for instance, but also, with James Scott's insistence on the functionality of disorder. It works because it doesn't Serres says and says and says. So to does Scott: the state succeeds because of the spaces it has been unable to sort out, the spaces of entropy, while the work to the rule strike paralyzes Paris. Despite all this, we still, somehow, don't have the tools not to suffocate ourselves, to let ourselves explode a bit, to live in heterdoxy without the desires to sort. Serres' writing (as everyone else has suggested) performs this confusion. It is impossible (at least for US Americans) to sort out his references, to get the jokes, to know what he's talking about once and for all. The confusion parasites us, it gets the last position. Serres cultivates a befuddled reader, but that's his point: it works because it doesn't, it forces us to explode a bit but we can't.
The Parasite is in me still. It was a good guest, keeping me occupied, entertained at my (reading) table. Does that make me a good host? I am a woman, it is true. But, I did not keep wine flowing (although now may be my chance, with words). Is Serres then the host? He introduces many guests: La Fontaine, Kipling, Plato, Raton, Rousseau, Jacob, Marx… Although, he may be a parasite, because we (brought together once again, or for the first time at this table) don’t occupy fixed roles, but relations, and these relations are changing. Among the metamorphoses and metaphors, Serres insists that the parasite is specific, located next to, on, but really between and in the host (and just like Derrida’s cat, it is real). The parasite, as person, as metaphor, as knowledge “paralyzes, analyzes, catalyzes,” transforming relationships, systems, society.
In The Parasite, Michel Serres explores boundaries, territories, relationships that are consumptive and interruptive, circulating relations of interconnection that affect intimacies and separations, alienation and (re)production. Serres moves us through feedback loops, which do feed. Parasites are world-making, and they make us excrete more, often in excess. But, excess, or rot, as discussed in relation to agriculture (178), is created by over-working, use of (usually) slave, and (certainly) exploited labor to produce surplus. Still, the excess is real, and relations, always shifting become systems of relations, which try to make stable that which is always changing. “who will ever know if parasitism is an obstacle to its proper functioning or if it is its very dynamics?” There is not an avant, even if the arrow is pointing, or moving in one direction. The parasite penetrates and invades, which has everything to do with power, recognition, money, and fear, as relational. But, the space was already open for this parasitic relationship: “Tartuffe brings about a crisis in the family, as does every parasite. But, perhaps the relations were shaky to start with… Perhaps the sound and the fury had already been announced by a noise…” (209).
The parasite, as the noise disrupts, masks, expresses power, silences others, there are multiple ongoing possibilities within these shifting relations which must be fuzzy. We write with, struggle against, work in noise and with mistakes, and growing complexities. These relations, these unfixities are the system, living. There was nothing before the noise, “in the beginning there was noise.”
If life is an interrupted meal, The Parasite can only be swallowed in bite-size chunks. Not consumable knowledge but morsels. Stories, sentences, sometimes one word: "fuzzy", "metamorphosis", "quasi-object", "thank-you" (you're welcome). Rather than tracing an argument, and following from our discussion last week, what might an ethnographic reading of the text look like? The narrative is complex, dizzying, obscure, but in some sense Serres makes our task as ethnographers utterly transparent in this reading. The parasite itself is already at work, we just need to try and follow it, listen out for its noise.
That the parasite is three - social, biological, static/interference - blurs epistemological and disciplinary boundaries by its very multiple incursions (scientific, anthropological, economic, literary) and ruptures dualistic logic by its very presence (a 3rd term). Most significantly, "the [parasitic] relation upsets equilibrium" (182). It is precisely the supposed balance of exchange logic that Serres is writing against; the parasite takes and does not give back. This feels unjust, and yet for Serres it is a fact of life, of human relations, a kind of all-pervading natural law. Indeed, Serres warns against underestimating the work the parasite is always doing: "People laugh, the parasite is expelled, he is made fun of, he is beaten, he cheats us; but he invents anew" (35). Whilst philosophy remains "caught in the relation between subject and object", all the while the parasite, which forces its inhabited environments into continual response (reaction?), are driving real change.
Serres repeats Derrida's repeated question: "Who am I?" The parasite can not ultimately be expelled, and so our unitary selves are left to cower from the "noises, din, clamor, fury, tumult" (253). A fundamental re-positioning is a condition of the logic produced (disrupted) by the parasite, and so we turn our attention to some kind of space in-between; a"milieu, mediate" (65). Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, which Serres gestures towards repeatedly through the text (e.g 70, 197), helps me conceptualise this space. The normal does not in some quantitative sense oppose or precede the pathological; one cannot be measured against the other; rather life, in relation to its changing environments, is adaptive, determinable only qualitatively. In conversation with Canguilhem, suggesting that "sickness, in general, is parasitic", Serres is insisting on the pervasiveness of the parasite as a fact of life. Relationality cannot be known absolutely, only lived, and inevitably interrupted. Change, adaption, interruption, sickness, are the only constants; "hence this book of metamorphoses", rather than of being (216).
Taking as his starting point the multiplicities of meaning in the (French) word parasite we enter into reflections upon information and communication theory as models not of “communication systems” but rather systems of relations. He is not the first, or the only person to make this move, and I think it is a very interesting move to reframe our understanding of relatedness through units of analysis in information. But as the text gets at these are not units of analysis that foretell an understanding of information as separate from social units. As he says, “quite simply, what is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, but the system of relations. The relation is that of guest to host [hote a hote]. Copying the relation of man to man brings us back to parasitism”. (8) Or as he says more precisely on the previous page, “we have made the louse in our image; let us see ourselves in his.” (7)
Moreover what gets bracketed above is really important, because in French the guest and the host are rendered as the same thing. In some way, shape or form they both take on the dual capacity of being host and guest (a parasite). We might alternatively say that the logic he is extrapolating from various texts (fables, philosophers, etc.) is patterned in the image of “the gift”. As the introduction says, in a way, what we are dealing with is a total social fact as Mauss used the gift as a total social fact. The introduction more or less gives us this when it suggests that “students of the analysis of the gift and its ramifications in works by Derrida, Bataille, and others that are bent on complicating and deconstructing the pioneering analysis in French anthropology by Marcel Mauss will find much more here to admire.” (xix) However, it is not a total social fact like Mauss’ (in a one-to-one sense) because it includes the nonhuman, and seemingly anything that can communicate in some way (Does Mauss resonate in such registers?); which begs a lot of questions about whether this should be read as a text arguing in favor of nativism. At some point he even says that the logic is operating both the "physical" and "social" worlds. The total social fact here seems to relate more to how people relate to each other (communicate) as opposed to relate to one another (kinship). But really, are we not looking at the union of both? There is an interesting relationship between homonyms that this text seems to suggest is not random, but rather needs to be explored.
With that in mind, I am interested in how different (similar) this project is to the project that Jullien undertakes in the Propensity of Things. And as well, it seems as though there are some interesting connections to Barad’s text. I am really interested in thinking through what work noise ‘does’, because this text seems to be clearly arguing that it’s not just meaningless static. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. For instance, I am reminded of the phenomena of ‘quantum teleportation’ (which Barad brings up in her text a couple times and I was thinking about exploring in the final paper), where static becomes the means by which information is transferred between a sender and receiver who have access to two entangled particles; which is completely different from how messages get packaged, and encrypted now. The implications for information security are enormous. (How does someone intercept a message that’s been encrypted as noise?) Such would really be a system of relations closed to only those particles that were entangled. Moreover, what does this text do for notions of “complexity”? (Which is currently the practical measure of security practices). As peripheral as these sort of details are they are not unrelated, especially if we do take this to be a text about a total social fact pertaining to systems of 'relations'. With that I could very well ask: if it were not about such systems, then what anthropological purchase would the text have? What are our own units of analysis that we have to lay bare before the altar of this text? How do we read this ethnographically? In the same way that Bruno Latour turns the social mirror upon nature and in turn showed us nature, this text is doing very similar work. But, is it different? How?
Lastly, what Alice said about how this text blurs “epistemological and disciplinary boundaries by” static, and the “multiple incursions (scientific, anthropological, economic, literary) and ruptures in dualistic logic by its presence (a 3rd term),” resonates a lot with what I said about last weeks texts. That third term (in the fuzzy logic) often times gets rendered as “Don’t care”. But, I think we should.
What I like about the Serres book is that I think it can help us think through this issue of ‘poorness’ that Heidigger has attributed to our human representation of ‘the animal’, and by virtue, ‘the animal’ itself. Let us consider the conception of the parasite as Serres puts forth [evident only in third derivative: as static, noise, interruption set within communication theory]: “Theorem: noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than a simple chain. This parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again.(14)” The key here is the process, the ‘cascading parasitic set of relations’ that Serres outlines: “interruption” [or intervention, engagement on behalf of the parasite], “consolidation” [acclimation/ re-organization to account for novelty], and finally, the “rise” of “a new system” [emergence/ reification of a general systematicity]. And this is a very novel description of the constitutive work that goes on between people, animals, things, whatever, in the formation of human knowledge and its practical applications (e.g. practicing the representation of the ‘poor animal’ in the human-formed world; i.e. domestication, dehumanizing livestock, or even something like the existence of corn— at near symbiotic level with the human species). What I then think is this: Could it be that perhaps the human parasite, and maybe more acutely human action/functions as the specific instantiation of the parasite as ‘noise’, serves as an interruption to the function of ‘the animot’, its existence, its umwelt, such that a one way relationship is built with regard to the manner in which we believe ‘the animot’ accounts for itself (e.g. the ego, level of consciousness, theory of mind that we believe is locked within the ‘animal I’)? Could we not then say that: ‘the animal is poor because its function is interrupted by our human functions (relational activities), their ontology interrupted by ours, [our understanding of] their mode of signification interrupted by our human model of linguistic exchange? After all, “We parasite each-other and live amidst parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute their environment’ (10). And when we consider this last addition of parasitic activity [the generative arrangement of the environment/ milieu], it becomes more plausible that maybe it is never been the case of the animal speaking in their own voice, of their own ‘I’ [and here in particular I think of Derrida and his sense of shame before the cat: nakedness and guilt are both human inventions, and yet we still transpose this sense of guilt or shame on an agent which in know way employs these concepts. Shame- here coupled with good old Christian guilt- is such a powerful representational system that it actually proceeds the human who creates it an resonates in all non-human spaces, which is how the cat, as other-defined-in-reference-to-human, conjures shame, but has no sense of it). In this sense, the conception of ‘the animal as poor in world’ seems subtly accurate because it is a unidirectional flow of relationality (as the embodiment of the parasite): the term ‘poor’, as a human term built with precise human connotations (like hierarchy, or structure, or economy), functions in such a way that it seems to be the animal itself describing itself as such (sorry). What this is then is something like the animal relating, conceptually, to humans in a human way, on human terms (through our system of representational organization). So in a way, if noise is always within the system, then by the same token, the animal is always poor, because we ask it to account for itself in our terms- something that is as laughable as it is fruitless.
Others have already articulated quite well the trivalency of the parasite and the ways in which the parasitic is the elemental relation, so I will just parasite off these posts and try to relate Serres's work here to the animal part of the organizing triumvurate of man/animal/stone. Serres's project lends itself to being less explicit about "the animal" than Derrida's from last week, yet I think there is continuity in the way animals are here imagined. For one, there is no homogeneous, categorical animal, but rather a multiplicity of specific animals; indeed, "the attribute of the parasite...is its specificity." The system - which works because it doesn't work - doesn't work precisely because of small differences and excitements, a slight knock on the door. Yet, he tells us, "It is not just anything that troubles a passing message. It is not just anyone who is invited to someone's table. A given larva develops only in a certain organism and is carried only be a certain vector" (230). Specificity matters because seemingly minor differences or chance movements can critically determine what maintains the equilibrium of the system or what begins a "parasitical cascade" that transforms everything.
Being specific is important both logically and politically for Serres, and I think in an ethical sense as well. Serres tells us that quasi-objects, put into action, are what ontologically constitute the parasite. And he asserts that man - the ultimate parasite - makes his living by organizing animals into "those that are invited and those that are hunted...[those] whom we parasite and those who might supplant us and whom we chase away, hunt, and eventually eliminate" (78). In other words, it's not quite enough to say that existence is multiple, dynamic, and networked and that we are constituted by our co-dependent relationships. According to Serries, we must account for the violences - material and discursive - done in forging one-way relationships (without, of course, sacrificing the "fuzziness" of the fragile lines that make up our collectives). Our relationships are labors of appropriation, Serries reminds us repeatedly; they are based on processes of exclusion and perpetual abuse (which he does not take to be necessarily negative in a normative sense, however). In order to create relationships, we have to shoot through space like an arrow, ripping things apart as we pierce together others, creating "a hole", "a wound" through which to pass. "Through this hole has passed history. Through this hole, the horse and his master come out." The farmer, in order to grow, must plow and disrupt - that is, abuse - the earth. "Wanting to do good is often so cruel....I never wanted anything more than some soup, a cobbler for the children, and some dessert on Sunday....But the hedge is crawling with wounds. I write. For example, I have to name the animals, just like Adam" (85). A vague statement, to be sure, but perhaps clearer because Derrida has already meditated on the violence of this originary act of naming. What's interesting here is the longing not to "work" in this sense, not to categorize, coupled with the necessity to do so.
What is the theme of "The Parasite"? Well, perhaps, a quick statement would be that the theme of "The Parasite" is that to be a parasite is not necessarily to be virulent but to be demanding. Moreover, there is a dynamic volley of demand and response, and hardly one-sided. Serres tells us that the parasite is both host and guest, which is a relationship generally thought of in terms of separate individuals. However, what Serres emphasizes is that the separation is a categorical designation, and between host and guest there is mitigation that we do not observe. There is "noise," excess or unintelligible information. We assume the certainty of positions such as host/guest, master/slave, yet we ignore the "noise," the processes on which these concepts are hedged.
There is no easy divide, but instead a shifting balance, which in varying situations may be perceived or experienced differently. For example, Serres, in one of his fables, discusses Zeus (master of the master, master of the slave), and Hermes (Master of the slave, Slave of the Master). Each is a master, but of a different subject; only Hermes is the slave in this scenarios (unless Zeus is a slave unto himself). To assume a strictly systematic hierarchy would ignore the mutability of these roles pertaining to differing circumstances as mediated by the middle process, or "quasi-object." In the case of Greek gods, power and position are contingent upon relationship between subjects. If we consider the middle factor to be whatever binds master to slave in that relationship, then that binding is broken as soon as the master becomes the slave to another master. Hermes is the master of others, yet he is the subordinate of Zeus; however, Hermes subordination does not erase his power, instead existing at the same time within a separate relationship. He is both master and slave in the same body, but not under the same circumstances.
What are humans, then? If humans are parasites, or at least have parasitic relationships, what does that say about what we know about ourselves? Categories are rendered insufficient to Serres' proposition. To be a host is an incomplete identity, an incomplete thought. To be human is thus as incomplete a thought as any other in Serres's text. The question becomes: what mitigates our humanity?
For Michel Serres, the parasite is ‘the elementary relation’. He is drawn in by the ontological mysteries presented by ‘relations’: what is the connection being and relating? Is there a distinction between the position and content of an entity and the relations by which it came to occupy that station? For Serres the process of writing is very much an elaboration of the argument itself. Indeed, at times this makes for rather tedious reading, and yet, the point is well taken: “the knot is explained/unfolded [s’explique]; it comes undone; it is unknotted; it was nothing, nothing but folds, loops, and coils. When explained, the banquet shows the hungry its empty table” (245). The Parasite is a seemingly endless train of thoughts inspired by a corpus of fables and myths, the texts of La Fontaine, Plato, Homer, Rousseau, and ‘the like’ if such a category exists. It begins with a city rat and a country rat eating the tax farmer’s leftovers. The rats continue to make appearances throughout the text – sometimes making noise, sometimes fleeing from noise, staying in the city, returning to the country, parasiting the farmer, being parasited by him, chewing, talking, hiding. One reads for ‘the point’. One is thwarted. From Serres himself: “I am a tired reader, out of breath; I’ve still read nothing after having read so much and run so much… Starved, glued to the door. Beggar. I wait for bread; I wait for wine; I ask to be fed… I require a bit of referent” (241). Tired indeed!
ReplyDeleteBut the ‘point’, if I dare hazard one, is that there is no stable referent: there are parasites, hosts, and guests, always in threes, but never inhabiting the same position for long. There are systems of relations, but as soon as a noise disrupts them, new systems form from the pieces. That which was a parasite (a play on biological parasite, social parasite, and the additional French meaning of static or noise, but always returning to the etymological ‘eating beside’) just as quickly finds itself in the position of host, or guest. Parasites are parasited, systems form and collapse, black boxes hide the workings of these systems and yet the box, when laid bare, is empty. When they ‘work’, they form an invisible system; when they ‘fail’ they make the system intelligible. “The parasite invents something new” (36). In the three pointed star (guest/host/parasite), the parasite makes diagonal lines from parallel lines, it mixes incompatible forms, it creates new orders, producing new relations and new forms of relations. The lion becomes the prey, the king becomes the weakest; the arrow of the parasite is unidirectional – it is the elementary relation – but positions shift at the slightest noise, radically altering the status of the mover.
The relationship between entities and relations is never quite made explicit. Indeed, to render such an opinion would be to attempt to force open the black box, to attempt to ‘explain’ without expecting an empty table as the result. I am reminded of Schrodinger’s cat: to look inside the box is to demand an ontological stability that defies the reality of the cat’s existence. Perhaps the closest we come to a mediation on the status of beings, relations, and beings in relation to relations, is in the discussion of quasi-objects and –subjects. Here we are given the analogy of a basketball game. “Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance. The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws. Skill with the ball supposes a Ptolemaic revolution of which few theoreticians are capable, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves” (226). And so, by redirecting our attention to the movement of the ball and decentering the team as that which directs the system, we begin to glimpse the parasitic workings of the system. The quasi-object decenters by radically redefining centering: the person with the ball becomes the ‘I’. The rest become the ‘we’ – not in the aggregate sense constituted by the remaining possible ‘I’’s that come together to not have the ball, but in an irreducible sense. “The ‘we’ is not a sum of the ‘I’’s, but a novelty produced by legacies, concessions, withdrawals, resignations, of the ‘I’. The ‘we’ is less a set of ‘I’’s than the set of the sets of its transmissions” (228). ‘I’’s and ‘we’’s are produced out of moving systems, entities emerge from unlikely circulations, only to be transubstantiated back into relations as soon as the ball is passed.
Sorry that this one went on a bit!
It seems best perhaps to take Serres at his word, such as when he says “Yes, my philosophy is adjectival; it is awe-struck. The real is not rational; it is improbable and miraculous” (46); “Henceforth, my book is rigorously fuzzy” (56); “I don’t want to play any more. Neither at the game of who is smarter nor that of the truth. For you can die of hunger, of cold, of drowning, while playing” (75); “We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks; no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked. This one here speaks learnedly; he is as boring as the last course he gave; he doesn’t care if people hear him” (121); and “The host does not speak much and is not understood; his logic is paradoxal. It is fuzzy; it is our own. His parasites are eating him up, and their noise covers his voice” (216).
ReplyDeleteTaking up the metaphor and pun of the parasite in the threefold way of meaning biological parasite, social parasite, and static or noise (as it does, apparently, in French), Serres posits a unidirectional relationship where the parasite feeds on a host like noise “feeds on” information, and universalizes his metaphor into a concept of social relations—that is, human relations are not “like” parasite relations, but rather they are parasite relations. Embodying his “argument” in his text, Serres makes The Parasite a parasite, a noisesome bloodsucker that feeds on culture and produces nothing (or only waste… or W.A.S.T.E. (see below)). As Serres writes: “The chain of parasitism is a simple relation of order, irreversible like the flow of the river. One feeds on another and gives nothing in return… For parasitism is an elementary relation; it is, in fact, the elements of the relation” (182).
It seems more interesting to me to consider Serres ethnographically, or even merely historically, than it does to consider his work philosophically. Like Derrida and Foucault he seems to write in a tradition of anti-humanist post-structural French thought that, after Nietzsche, works to find the irrational in the rational, after Heidegger, works to turn from philosophy to poetry, after Kojeve, struggles with the idea of the end of history, and against Sartre turns from existential political engagement to an individualist ethics of transgression and play. Serres, like Derrida, is engaged in an argument with the western philosophical canon that has to do with the very fundamentals of what philosophy is and does and how one philosophizes. For Serres, writing in the dark aspect of the Romantic tradition as it comes through Nietzsche, Artaud, the Dadaists, and the Situationists, the creativity of the irrational, unconscious, or incoherent is valued over the “systemization” of rationality.
Piercing the foggy banks of nonsense that (deliberately) cloud the pages of The Parasite are occasional insights that seem interesting, provocative, or worth following up. On the question of order and disorder, though, on noise and social relations, I found Serres’ regular references to Maxwell’s Demon to call to mind a much more beautiful and arresting work, which addresses some of the same themes, and Maxwell’s Demon, and even W.A.S.T.E…. namely Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
It is difficult to extract from a totalizing work like The Parasite, which as Roy rightfully says, “Serres, like Derrida, is engaged in an argument with the western philosophical canon that has to do with the very fundamentals of what philosophy is and does and how one philosophizes”. How do you deal with a sentence as powerful as “Metamorphosis is omnipotence”? Well, I guess we do what we will do in class tomorrow and focus on quasi-objects or something else very specific in The Parasite and try to get a grasp on these specific concepts (if we can call them concepts at all). After all, “philosophy with its cold-heartedness, with its military strategy…it want[s] to [be] separate” (251). But, perhaps, Serres pushes us away from this. How can we be warm-hearted? How can we be more like the holistic anthropologist? How can we not only see the larger picture, but stay with it in our conversation? How do we say something which is less specific, yet always aware of the presence of the parasite (the specific), something as warm-hearted as “Good morning hare; stay if you’d like” (p.88; as Serres tells us: “as long as you have one hare in the garden, and only one hare, it’s better to make your peace with it”).
ReplyDeleteLike a classic Pollock painting, all I saw were a bunch of sporadic lines thrown together in The Parasite, as if someone vomited… suddenly. But then I got to page 200ish, perhaps a place equivalent to standing 20 or so feet away from a Pollock painting, and I saw an awesome kind of order. This order is found when you suddenly discover the rhythm of Serres’ work. This is perhaps what I mean by “seeing the larger picture”. It is when the rhythm of Serres’ text is discovered that the true meaning/presence/job/work of the parasite is discovered.
This rhythm, as an order or unity, revolves around the parasite. As we are told, the parasite, the ferret or fox, the (all)white domino, the joker or wildcard, the dollar bill, “that little troublemaker” is the exciter (196,190). It does not transform, but it does change states (193). Serres story is that of the Parasite’s journey, which is precisely the story of ourselves since we are inextricably linked, so much to the extent that it would seem we are no different from the ball “over there, on the ground, it is nothing; it is stupid; it has no meaning, no function” (225). The rhythm, cascade or “chain of the parasite [as] a simple relation of order” (183) is how it “transforms a physiological order into a new order” (198).
An interesting duality in Serres’ work (as much as the brain can ingest it) is the dynamic tension between the tripartite and hierarchy. In his explanation of the host – parasite - interrupter chain he states, “The three positions are equivalent. Each is in a line with the others, and each can play the third.” (19) Given this idea of interchangeability, he also discusses power structures throughout the text, for example, in the form of master-slaves (59) or vicar – priest (109). So, on the one hand there is equivalence and the other domination/subservience. He goes on to say, “This slave has become a master, that is certainly true, but far from becoming a master of the master, he becomes another master of the slaves. As such, as the representative of the slaves, he struggles with the master.” (59) Is this the process within the hierarchy that makes it interchangeable? What is the topography of Serres’ imagined world in this sense? Can we think of this in terms of Jullien’s idea of position as independent from the occupier? What does that do to Serres’ quasi-objects?
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, in the preface, Wolfe links Serres’ book to Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. (xi) Since the two are contemporaries and have collaborated how do their ideas correspond in their objects – the black box, the arrow of time? In other words, are the objects comparable enough that can we read this through a Latourian lens?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSerres’s emphasis on relationality speaks to our conversations about the kinds of ethnographic writing and reading that decenter the human so often figured as the sole perceiving and experiencing subject. Serres is not interested in looking for depth of meaning in stable “places”, nor does he care to ask what different perspectives there are on things. His concerns are situated outside such humanist pursuits: “what is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations. The relation is that of guest to host” (8). Serres figures relations between things in the world as always parasitic and it is through this parasitism that new worlds emerge. “Parasite” draws our attention to this emergence and --through text-- performs it. It erases the division between humans and nonhumans: all are busy sorting out the noise in order to set up workable relations, if just for a while. “I no longer see the difference between the bee and the architect” (86).
ReplyDeleteWhile for many philosophers and social theorists things come in twos, they come in threes for Serres. “Bivalent systems get lost around here” (67). The third mediates and its work often goes unrecognized (63). It’s a specific kind of mediation: it does not follow from the existence of two things in need of reconciling. The parasite institutes the relation, the third comes before the second. For Levi-Strauss, the poet of twos, the complexity of the system was generated throught the logical work of binary oppositions. For Serres, the poet of threes, the logic is fuzzy: it is not about 0 or 1, but 0, 1 and the gray area in between. Complexity figured in twos grows through proliferating of binaries which sort and exclude, this OR that. Complexity figured in threes grows through incorporation of still more fuzziness, this AND that.
Different numbers prompt different desires. Write a book while counting to two and you get “Elementary Structures of Kinship”: the text works to undo the complexity to uncover a unitary set of norms somewhere at the bottom, the ur-binary. Write a book while counting to three and the process will be very different: the text adds to the complexity. “[T]he genius never undoes the system; he generalizes it, introducing into it a supplementary variable with its countervariable ... The recovery of the simple through the complex” (68).
“There are two ways to die, two ways to sleep, two ways to be stupid - a head first dive into chaos or stabilized installation in order and chitin. We are provided with enough senses and instinct to protect us against the danger of explosion, but we do not have enough when faced with death from order or with falling asleep from rules and harmony” (127).
ReplyDeleteIs Serres an anarchist? I mean this in the best possible way. There were a series of unexpected resonances in the Parasite to the work of some anarchist theorists: Kropotkin on mutual aid, for instance, but also, with James Scott's insistence on the functionality of disorder. It works because it doesn't Serres says and says and says. So to does Scott: the state succeeds because of the spaces it has been unable to sort out, the spaces of entropy, while the work to the rule strike paralyzes Paris. Despite all this, we still, somehow, don't have the tools not to suffocate ourselves, to let ourselves explode a bit, to live in heterdoxy without the desires to sort. Serres' writing (as everyone else has suggested) performs this confusion. It is impossible (at least for US Americans) to sort out his references, to get the jokes, to know what he's talking about once and for all. The confusion parasites us, it gets the last position. Serres cultivates a befuddled reader, but that's his point: it works because it doesn't, it forces us to explode a bit but we can't.
Nina Mehta
ReplyDeleteSerres- Parasite
The Parasite is in me still. It was a good guest, keeping me occupied, entertained at my (reading) table. Does that make me a good host? I am a woman, it is true. But, I did not keep wine flowing (although now may be my chance, with words). Is Serres then the host? He introduces many guests: La Fontaine, Kipling, Plato, Raton, Rousseau, Jacob, Marx… Although, he may be a parasite, because we (brought together once again, or for the first time at this table) don’t occupy fixed roles, but relations, and these relations are changing. Among the metamorphoses and metaphors, Serres insists that the parasite is specific, located next to, on, but really between and in the host (and just like Derrida’s cat, it is real). The parasite, as person, as metaphor, as knowledge “paralyzes, analyzes, catalyzes,” transforming relationships, systems, society.
In The Parasite, Michel Serres explores boundaries, territories, relationships that are consumptive and interruptive, circulating relations of interconnection that affect intimacies and separations, alienation and (re)production. Serres moves us through feedback loops, which do feed. Parasites are world-making, and they make us excrete more, often in excess. But, excess, or rot, as discussed in relation to agriculture (178), is created by over-working, use of (usually) slave, and (certainly) exploited labor to produce surplus. Still, the excess is real, and relations, always shifting become systems of relations, which try to make stable that which is always changing. “who will ever know if parasitism is an obstacle to its proper functioning or if it is its very dynamics?” There is not an avant, even if the arrow is pointing, or moving in one direction. The parasite penetrates and invades, which has everything to do with power, recognition, money, and fear, as relational. But, the space was already open for this parasitic relationship: “Tartuffe brings about a crisis in the family, as does every parasite. But, perhaps the relations were shaky to start with… Perhaps the sound and the fury had already been announced by a noise…” (209).
The parasite, as the noise disrupts, masks, expresses power, silences others, there are multiple ongoing possibilities within these shifting relations which must be fuzzy. We write with, struggle against, work in noise and with mistakes, and growing complexities. These relations, these unfixities are the system, living. There was nothing before the noise, “in the beginning there was noise.”
If life is an interrupted meal, The Parasite can only be swallowed in bite-size chunks. Not consumable knowledge but morsels. Stories, sentences, sometimes one word: "fuzzy", "metamorphosis", "quasi-object", "thank-you" (you're welcome). Rather than tracing an argument, and following from our discussion last week, what might an ethnographic reading of the text look like? The narrative is complex, dizzying, obscure, but in some sense Serres makes our task as ethnographers utterly transparent in this reading. The parasite itself is already at work, we just need to try and follow it, listen out for its noise.
ReplyDeleteThat the parasite is three - social, biological, static/interference - blurs epistemological and disciplinary boundaries by its very multiple incursions (scientific, anthropological, economic, literary) and ruptures dualistic logic by its very presence (a 3rd term). Most significantly, "the [parasitic] relation upsets equilibrium" (182). It is precisely the supposed balance of exchange logic that Serres is writing against; the parasite takes and does not give back. This feels unjust, and yet for Serres it is a fact of life, of human relations, a kind of all-pervading natural law. Indeed, Serres warns against underestimating the work the parasite is always doing: "People laugh, the parasite is expelled, he is made fun of, he is beaten, he cheats us; but he invents anew" (35). Whilst philosophy remains "caught in the relation between subject and object", all the while the parasite, which forces its inhabited environments into continual response (reaction?), are driving real change.
Serres repeats Derrida's repeated question: "Who am I?" The parasite can not ultimately be expelled, and so our unitary selves are left to cower from the "noises, din, clamor, fury, tumult" (253). A fundamental re-positioning is a condition of the logic produced (disrupted) by the parasite, and so we turn our attention to some kind of space in-between; a"milieu, mediate" (65). Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological, which Serres gestures towards repeatedly through the text (e.g 70, 197), helps me conceptualise this space. The normal does not in some quantitative sense oppose or precede the pathological; one cannot be measured against the other; rather life, in relation to its changing environments, is adaptive, determinable only qualitatively. In conversation with Canguilhem, suggesting that "sickness, in general, is parasitic", Serres is insisting on the pervasiveness of the parasite as a fact of life. Relationality cannot be known absolutely, only lived, and inevitably interrupted. Change, adaption, interruption, sickness, are the only constants; "hence this book of metamorphoses", rather than of being (216).
Taking as his starting point the multiplicities of meaning in the (French) word parasite we enter into reflections upon information and communication theory as models not of “communication systems” but rather systems of relations. He is not the first, or the only person to make this move, and I think it is a very interesting move to reframe our understanding of relatedness through units of analysis in information. But as the text gets at these are not units of analysis that foretell an understanding of information as separate from social units. As he says, “quite simply, what is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, but the system of relations. The relation is that of guest to host [hote a hote]. Copying the relation of man to man brings us back to parasitism”. (8) Or as he says more precisely on the previous page, “we have made the louse in our image; let us see ourselves in his.” (7)
ReplyDeleteMoreover what gets bracketed above is really important, because in French the guest and the host are rendered as the same thing. In some way, shape or form they both take on the dual capacity of being host and guest (a parasite). We might alternatively say that the logic he is extrapolating from various texts (fables, philosophers, etc.) is patterned in the image of “the gift”. As the introduction says, in a way, what we are dealing with is a total social fact as Mauss used the gift as a total social fact. The introduction more or less gives us this when it suggests that “students of the analysis of the gift and its ramifications in works by Derrida, Bataille, and others that are bent on complicating and deconstructing the pioneering analysis in French anthropology by Marcel Mauss will find much more here to admire.” (xix) However, it is not a total social fact like Mauss’ (in a one-to-one sense) because it includes the nonhuman, and seemingly anything that can communicate in some way (Does Mauss resonate in such registers?); which begs a lot of questions about whether this should be read as a text arguing in favor of nativism. At some point he even says that the logic is operating both the "physical" and "social" worlds. The total social fact here seems to relate more to how people relate to each other (communicate) as opposed to relate to one another (kinship). But really, are we not looking at the union of both? There is an interesting relationship between homonyms that this text seems to suggest is not random, but rather needs to be explored.
With that in mind, I am interested in how different (similar) this project is to the project that Jullien undertakes in the Propensity of Things. And as well, it seems as though there are some interesting connections to Barad’s text. I am really interested in thinking through what work noise ‘does’, because this text seems to be clearly arguing that it’s not just meaningless static. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. For instance, I am reminded of the phenomena of ‘quantum teleportation’ (which Barad brings up in her text a couple times and I was thinking about exploring in the final paper), where static becomes the means by which information is transferred between a sender and receiver who have access to two entangled particles; which is completely different from how messages get packaged, and encrypted now. The implications for information security are enormous. (How does someone intercept a message that’s been encrypted as noise?) Such would really be a system of relations closed to only those particles that were entangled. Moreover, what does this text do for notions of “complexity”? (Which is currently the practical measure of security practices). As peripheral as these sort of details are they are not unrelated, especially if we do take this to be a text about a total social fact pertaining to systems of 'relations'. With that I could very well ask: if it were not about such systems, then what anthropological purchase would the text have? What are our own units of analysis that we have to lay bare before the altar of this text? How do we read this ethnographically? In the same way that Bruno Latour turns the social mirror upon nature and in turn showed us nature, this text is doing very similar work. But, is it different? How?
Lastly, what Alice said about how this text blurs “epistemological and disciplinary boundaries by” static, and the “multiple incursions (scientific, anthropological, economic, literary) and ruptures in dualistic logic by its presence (a 3rd term),” resonates a lot with what I said about last weeks texts. That third term (in the fuzzy logic) often times gets rendered as “Don’t care”. But, I think we should.
What I like about the Serres book is that I think it can help us think through this issue of ‘poorness’ that Heidigger has attributed to our human representation of ‘the animal’, and by virtue, ‘the animal’ itself. Let us consider the conception of the parasite as Serres puts forth [evident only in third derivative: as static, noise, interruption set within communication theory]: “Theorem: noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than a simple chain. This parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again.(14)” The key here is the process, the ‘cascading parasitic set of relations’ that Serres outlines: “interruption” [or intervention, engagement on behalf of the parasite], “consolidation” [acclimation/ re-organization to account for novelty], and finally, the “rise” of “a new system” [emergence/ reification of a general systematicity]. And this is a very novel description of the constitutive work that goes on between people, animals, things, whatever, in the formation of human knowledge and its practical applications (e.g. practicing the representation of the ‘poor animal’ in the human-formed world; i.e. domestication, dehumanizing livestock, or even something like the existence of corn— at near symbiotic level with the human species).
ReplyDeleteWhat I then think is this: Could it be that perhaps the human parasite, and maybe more acutely human action/functions as the specific instantiation of the parasite as ‘noise’, serves as an interruption to the function of ‘the animot’, its existence, its umwelt, such that a one way relationship is built with regard to the manner in which we believe ‘the animot’ accounts for itself (e.g. the ego, level of consciousness, theory of mind that we believe is locked within the ‘animal I’)? Could we not then say that: ‘the animal is poor because its function is interrupted by our human functions (relational activities), their ontology interrupted by ours, [our understanding of] their mode of signification interrupted by our human model of linguistic exchange? After all, “We parasite each-other and live amidst parasites. Which is more or less a way of saying that they constitute their environment’ (10). And when we consider this last addition of parasitic activity [the generative arrangement of the environment/ milieu], it becomes more plausible that maybe it is never been the case of the animal speaking in their own voice, of their own ‘I’ [and here in particular I think of Derrida and his sense of shame before the cat: nakedness and guilt are both human inventions, and yet we still transpose this sense of guilt or shame on an agent which in know way employs these concepts. Shame- here coupled with good old Christian guilt- is such a powerful representational system that it actually proceeds the human who creates it an resonates in all non-human spaces, which is how the cat, as other-defined-in-reference-to-human, conjures shame, but has no sense of it).
In this sense, the conception of ‘the animal as poor in world’ seems subtly accurate because it is a unidirectional flow of relationality (as the embodiment of the parasite): the term ‘poor’, as a human term built with precise human connotations (like hierarchy, or structure, or economy), functions in such a way that it seems to be the animal itself describing itself as such (sorry). What this is then is something like the animal relating, conceptually, to humans in a human way, on human terms (through our system of representational organization). So in a way, if noise is always within the system, then by the same token, the animal is always poor, because we ask it to account for itself in our terms- something that is as laughable as it is fruitless.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOthers have already articulated quite well the trivalency of the parasite and the ways in which the parasitic is the elemental relation, so I will just parasite off these posts and try to relate Serres's work here to the animal part of the organizing triumvurate of man/animal/stone. Serres's project lends itself to being less explicit about "the animal" than Derrida's from last week, yet I think there is continuity in the way animals are here imagined. For one, there is no homogeneous, categorical animal, but rather a multiplicity of specific animals; indeed, "the attribute of the parasite...is its specificity." The system - which works because it doesn't work - doesn't work precisely because of small differences and excitements, a slight knock on the door. Yet, he tells us, "It is not just anything that troubles a passing message. It is not just anyone who is invited to someone's table. A given larva develops only in a certain organism and is carried only be a certain vector" (230). Specificity matters because seemingly minor differences or chance movements can critically determine what maintains the equilibrium of the system or what begins a "parasitical cascade" that transforms everything.
ReplyDeleteBeing specific is important both logically and politically for Serres, and I think in an ethical sense as well. Serres tells us that quasi-objects, put into action, are what ontologically constitute the parasite. And he asserts that man - the ultimate parasite - makes his living by organizing animals into "those that are invited and those that are hunted...[those] whom we parasite and those who might supplant us and whom we chase away, hunt, and eventually eliminate" (78). In other words, it's not quite enough to say that existence is multiple, dynamic, and networked and that we are constituted by our co-dependent relationships. According to Serries, we must account for the violences - material and discursive - done in forging one-way relationships (without, of course, sacrificing the "fuzziness" of the fragile lines that make up our collectives). Our relationships are labors of appropriation, Serries reminds us repeatedly; they are based on processes of exclusion and perpetual abuse (which he does not take to be necessarily negative in a normative sense, however). In order to create relationships, we have to shoot through space like an arrow, ripping things apart as we pierce together others, creating "a hole", "a wound" through which to pass. "Through this hole has passed history. Through this hole, the horse and his master come out." The farmer, in order to grow, must plow and disrupt - that is, abuse - the earth. "Wanting to do good is often so cruel....I never wanted anything more than some soup, a cobbler for the children, and some dessert on Sunday....But the hedge is crawling with wounds. I write. For example, I have to name the animals, just like Adam" (85). A vague statement, to be sure, but perhaps clearer because Derrida has already meditated on the violence of this originary act of naming. What's interesting here is the longing not to "work" in this sense, not to categorize, coupled with the necessity to do so.
What is the theme of "The Parasite"? Well, perhaps, a quick statement would be that the theme of "The Parasite" is that to be a parasite is not necessarily to be virulent but to be demanding. Moreover, there is a dynamic volley of demand and response, and hardly one-sided. Serres tells us that the parasite is both host and guest, which is a relationship generally thought of in terms of separate individuals. However, what Serres emphasizes is that the separation is a categorical designation, and between host and guest there is mitigation that we do not observe. There is "noise," excess or unintelligible information. We assume the certainty of positions such as host/guest, master/slave, yet we ignore the "noise," the processes on which these concepts are hedged.
ReplyDeleteThere is no easy divide, but instead a shifting balance, which in varying situations may be perceived or experienced differently. For example, Serres, in one of his fables, discusses Zeus (master of the master, master of the slave), and Hermes (Master of the slave, Slave of the Master). Each is a master, but of a different subject; only Hermes is the slave in this scenarios (unless Zeus is a slave unto himself). To assume a strictly systematic hierarchy would ignore the mutability of these roles pertaining to differing circumstances as mediated by the middle process, or "quasi-object." In the case of Greek gods, power and position are contingent upon relationship between subjects. If we consider the middle factor to be whatever binds master to slave in that relationship, then that binding is broken as soon as the master becomes the slave to another master. Hermes is the master of others, yet he is the subordinate of Zeus; however, Hermes subordination does not erase his power, instead existing at the same time within a separate relationship. He is both master and slave in the same body, but not under the same circumstances.
What are humans, then? If humans are parasites, or at least have parasitic relationships, what does that say about what we know about ourselves? Categories are rendered insufficient to Serres' proposition. To be a host is an incomplete identity, an incomplete thought. To be human is thus as incomplete a thought as any other in Serres's text. The question becomes: what mitigates our humanity?